Scribble-based 3D Multiple Abdominal Organ Segmentation via Triple-branch Multi-dilated Network with Pixel- and Class-wise Consistency

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel 3D deep learning framework with consistency constraints for scribble-supervised segmentation of multiple abdominal organs in CT images, reducing annotation effort while maintaining high accuracy.

Contribution

It proposes a triple-branch multi-dilated network with pseudo label refinement and class affinity consistency, advancing weakly supervised multi-organ segmentation methods.

Findings

Outperforms five existing scribble-supervised methods on WORD dataset.

Effectively utilizes voxel-wise uncertainty for pseudo label refinement.

Demonstrates improved segmentation accuracy with reduced annotation effort.

Abstract

Multi-organ segmentation in abdominal Computed Tomography (CT) images is of great importance for diagnosis of abdominal lesions and subsequent treatment planning. Though deep learning based methods have attained high performance, they rely heavily on large-scale pixel-level annotations that are time-consuming and labor-intensive to obtain. Due to its low dependency on annotation, weakly supervised segmentation has attracted great attention. However, there is still a large performance gap between current weakly-supervised methods and fully supervised learning, leaving room for exploration. In this work, we propose a novel 3D framework with two consistency constraints for scribble-supervised multiple abdominal organ segmentation from CT. Specifically, we employ a Triple-branch multi-Dilated network (TDNet) with one encoder and three decoders using different dilation rates to capture features from different receptive fields that are complementary to each other to generate high-quality soft pseudo labels. For more stable unsupervised learning, we use voxel-wise uncertainty to rectify the soft pseudo labels and then supervise the outputs of each decoder. To further regularize the network, class relationship information is exploited by encouraging the generated class affinity matrices to be consistent across different decoders under multi-view projection. Experiments on the public WORD dataset show that our method outperforms five existing scribble-supervised methods.